Daily Archives: 15 April 2009

Sandeep Adhwaryu, the chief illustrator of Outlook magazine, has bagged the first prize in the first “Maya Kamath Memorial Award for excellence in cartooning-2008”, organized by the Indian Institute of Cartoonists, Bangalore.

This was the winning entry:

The award carries a cash prize of Rs 25,000.

The award is in memory of Maya Kamath, India’s only woman political cartoonist who did work for The Times of India and The Asian Age, before her untimely demise in 2001at the age of 50.

The second prize has gone to Ramadhyani of Naavika, a Kannada daily, and the third prize to Shankar of the multi-edition Telugu daily, Saakshi.

Muhammad Zahoor of The Daily, Peshwar, won a special jury award.

The entries for the awards were judged by the playwright Girish Karnad; the resident editor of The Times of India in Bangalore, H.S. Balram; the artist S.G. Vasudev; and the chief political cartoonist of The Hindu, Keshav.

April 16, 2009, marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style, the landmark book by William Strunk and E.B. White.

In The Chronicle Review, Geoffrey K. Pullum, a professor of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, uses the occasion to stick a long, deep, and well honed knife into the “little book” that is loved and admired by anally-retentive, grammar conscious journalists.

“The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense…. both authors were grammatical incompetents…

“Some of the recommendations are vapid, like “Be clear” (how could one disagree?). Some are tautologous, like “Do not explain too much.” (Explaining too much means explaining more than you should, so of course you shouldn’t.) Many are useless, like “Omit needless words.” (The students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction.)”